How to schedule tweets with Google Calendar

Do you have a Twitter account to promote your latest articles? If your answer is yes, then I strongly advise you to continue reading this article – the tips I am about to give you have revolutionized my way of working with Twitter! Scheduling tweets has never been so easy for me! And believe me, I tried many techniques!

From one hour of work on scheduling tweets per week, I’m not down to 15 minutes! It’s super efficient! Do you want to do the same thing as me ?! 😉

The problem with Hootsuite

I used Hootsuite for a long time to plan all my social media publications. The website is easy to use and efficient, and the free plan have much more features than a free Buffer account. That’s the main reason I chose Hootsuite. However, I soon felt limited! It took 15 minutes per blog post to copy / paste my tweets to spread over 1 year of promotion. It was taking too much time.

The major problem with Hootsuite is that it’s impossible to add recurrence to a tweet. I wanted to be able to publish a tweet every week, or every 2 weeks for a certain period of time. To do this, I had to copy and paste manually my tweet and choose a date as many times as needed. It became very repetitive to do!

The solution with Google Calendar and IFTTT

IFTTT and Google Calendar have fixed this problem!

In the image you see, one event is equal to one tweet that’s going to be published once the event “starts”.

I can now:

• Change the time or day of my tweets by moving the events
• Many choices of recurrence for my tweets
• Visual view of when tweets go live

On IFTTT, I had already tried an applet that used Google Calendar and put the events (tweets) in my “queue” on Buffer. On the other hand, I was very disappointed with this applet, because it only worked 50% of the time. This new solution always works!

Related | 7 applets on IFTTT to automate your blogging tasks

Step-by-Step Guide to Program Your Tweets on Google Calendar

Create the automation on IFTTT

If you don’t already know IFTTT, start by reading this article I wrote and that will explain how it works.

1. Go to IFTTT, login on your account and go to this applet.
2. Click on “Turn on” to enable the automation
3. Optional: If this is the first time you have connected Twitter and Google Calendar to your IFTTT account, you will be asked to accept permissions. Do it!
   1. Then choose the Gmail account whose calendar you want to use to program your tweets. For my part, I took the email address of my blog : marie@girlknowstech.com.
   2. Click “Allow” to give IFTTT permission to use your calendar
      
   3. Accept the same thing for Twitter!
4. In the “Keyword or phrase” section, you can leave “ScheduleTweet”. This will be the keyword that will be used as the first word in the title of the event in the calendar, the one that will be the trigger of our automation. (I will explain later, when we’ll get there)
   
5. In the “Post a tweet” section, leave “Description” as it should be entered by default
   
6. Click Save, and you have done everything you needed to do on IFTTT!

Schedule tweets from Google Calendar

You will have to repeat these steps each time you want to schedule an extra tweet!

1. Sign in to your Gmail account that is connected to IFTTT (we did this in step 3). If you do not know, you can go to this page to find out what your email address is.
2. Go to Google Calendar!
3. Click a time slot where you want to publish a tweet, and choose “Edit Event”
   
4. Enter the information for the event (or tweet! ;))
   1. Title: The first word must be “ScheduleTweet” since this is what we have determined on IFTTT previously. Then I always write the whole tweet, since this allows me to see at first glance of my calendar what tweet will be published when. Otherwise, we only see “ScheduleTweet” and it does not tell us much!
   2. Description: It’s actually your tweet! So write your tweet and make sure it’s under 140 characters. For my part, I always go on Twitter, write a tweet, and then copy the result into the description field. This way, I make sure that my tweet always respects the maximum number of characters allowed.
      
   3. If you want the tweet to be done in a recurring way, check the “Repeat” box, this window will open, and you will be able to set the recurrence you want!
      
   4. Click on “Done”
5. Once all the fields are filled for your event, click on the red “Save” button, and you’re done!

Conclusion

And here we are, we have completed the steps! I hope these have been clear enough and will help you easily schedule all your tweets from now on! Do not hesitate if you have any question to leave a comment, it is always my pleasure to help you!

If you do not use this technique to program your tweets, tell me in comments, how do you do it !?